Among the first to join the fight against climate change in the United States was writer and activist Bill McKibben. His 1989 book The End of Nature was the first to explain climate change to a mainstream audience. He is also the founder of the climate campaign 350.org, which has branches in cities all over the world, including many in the Puget Sound region.
McKibben will be in Seattle on Tuesday evening with his new book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, in which he argues that it’s not too late for clean energy to take hold. KNKX environment reporter Bellamy Pailthorp recently caught up with him.
Click “Listen” above to hear their conversation, or find the transcript below.
Transcript
Note: This transcript is provided for reference only and may contain typos. Please confirm accuracy before quoting.
KNKX Environment Reporter Bellamy Pailthorp: Bill McKibben, your book Here Comes the Sun is subtitled “a last chance for climate and a fresh chance for civilization.” So, we've reached some kind of a tipping point. Why are solar, and to some extent, wind and battery, technology in your view the last and best hope for civilization? What happened?
Bill McKibben: What happened is we crossed an invisible line where these became, about five years ago, the cheapest way to produce power in this world, and all of a sudden they are surging. And that is great news, because we are in desperate need of clean power. We are, as you know, destabilizing our climate fast. We can see it in the endless reporting that you do every day on fire and flood and heat wave. So, we need a surge of this kind of clean energy. In fact, we need it even faster than it's coming. Our hope is to speed it up. But this is the first thing in the 40 years that I've been working on this climate crisis that scales fast enough to have any effect at all on these crises.
Pailthorp: We've kind of been here before, haven't we? I'm thinking about Ronald Reagan ripping solar panels off of the White House that Jimmy Carter had put up in the late 70s with the hope of getting to 20% solar energy by the year 2000. What can we learn from that crisis back then?
McKibben: Fool me once, you know, shame on you, but fool me twice — that's where we are now. We're repeating the mistake that we made with Ronald Reagan of now turning our back on what's now incredibly cheap, you know, solar power's 100 times cheaper than it was during the Carter administration. In those days, it would have taken real effort to do what we should have done, because if we had, we would have averted the climate crisis. But now it's an absolute no brainer, unless, of course, you own an oil well or a coal mine. Then you'd be willing to spend almost anything to game our system politically, to keep your valuable asset valuable, instead of watching its value erode away as people learn to harness the sun and the wind.
Pailthorp: Yeah, it's cheaper, and it's also more and more available. I'm thinking about new developments with balcony solar, which is very widespread, starting in Germany and now all the way to Utah.
McKibben: If you live in an apartment, you don't have a roof, but you often have a balcony with a railing on it. If you live in Europe, you just go to Best Buy, plunk down a couple 100 euros, come back with a solar panel that just plugs straight into your wall, no wiring, no electricians, might provide a quarter of the energy you use in your apartment. Sadly, illegal everywhere in the U.S., except, as you note, the state of Utah, which passed enabling legislation by a unanimous vote of the legislature this year. We're determined to spread that around the country. It's one of the tasks we've set for “Sunday” on September 21.
Pailthorp: We'll get to that in just a moment. But you know, what are some other affordable ways on the horizon that can help people reduce their energy bills while also choosing clean energy?
McKibben: People should be able to get much, much cheaper rooftop solar than they do. It's three times as expensive here as it is in Australia or in Europe. A little bit of that's the panel, but mostly it's the permitting costs. We have 15,000 municipalities, each with their own building code, their own team of inspectors. It would be much more rational to use what's called the SolarApp+ — already mandated in California, Maryland and New Jersey — that provides instant permits once contractors type in the kind of equipment they're using. This is the sort of thing that we're going to need our state and local governments to do while our federal government is refusing to act.
Pailthorp: That would be a way of bringing costs down despite the loss of subsidies.
McKibben: Exactly right, and quickly speeding the spread of this stuff; 40% of the homes in Australia have solar panels on the roof, compared with about 4% in America.
Pailthorp: Some folks feel like, given the success in particular of these clean forms of energy, that it's time for them to stop being supported and stop being subsidized. How do you answer that?
McKibben: Great argument — except for the fact that the fossil fuel industry is the most subsidized thing that we have ever seen. In fact, there's a new report coming out that I just saw the advance edition of. Fossil fuel industry gets somewhere north of $30 billion in handouts every year. We just added $4 billion in new handouts during the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," most of them for coal. Now, we started using coal in the mid- early 18th century. If we haven't figured out this technology yet, no number of subsidies will ever get us there. Subsidies make great sense for new technologies that we are trying to spread because they have great social benefit, and that's why all sorts of countries are putting up the upfront money to build the renewable infrastructure that then allows us to harvest the sun for free. By every study that we've seen, the net effect of making that conversion fast is to save the country and the world trillions of dollars just because you don't have to keep buying more fuel. But you do have to get over that first hurdle. So this is precisely the kind of industry it makes huge sense to subsidize. Instead, we're pouring subsidies into the fossil fuel industry just because they have lots of political power.
Pailthorp: Many other countries are already forging full steam ahead, especially China. Give us just a wide shot of what's going on globally with solar.
McKibben: What's happening in most of the world is a very rapid shift in the direction of sun and wind. And it's spurred by cost, and it's also spurred by people's desire to be free of the control that comes when someone else provides your energy. So Europe is moving very fast to renewable energy because they learned they couldn't rely on Vladimir Putin to supply them with natural gas. Now, a bunch of countries even in the last few weeks —Indonesia, Malaysia — have announced huge solar programs, in part, I think, because they don't want to depend on the U.S. for a supply of liquefied natural gas. It's much cheaper and much more — well, look, let's be clear, our government's now fickle and erratic. Who would want to depend on it for anything important?
Pailthorp: And they can supply a lot of that from China.
McKibben: China will sell them the solar panels, and then the sun will send them the energy. And you know, one of the things about the sun is it works pretty well as you get towards the equator. That's balanced by the fact that wind works ever better the further north you get. So these two really complement each other beautifully.
Pailthorp: You mentioned your new initiative called "Sunday." It's on September 21. You're calling on folks to rally for solar power. What's the main message there? And what will be happening where?
McKibben: There'll be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of beautiful events across the country, including a bunch all across Washington — you can find out at Sunday.earth. There'll be concerts, protests, e-bike parades, Habitat for Humanity homes with solar panels going up on the roof, a thousand things like that. Part of the goal is legislative, as we've discussed, put some pressure on for permitting reform to make it easier to do solar, but part of it is simply to drive home the key message here: This is no longer alternative energy. This is the common sense, obvious, straightforward way to power the future, no matter what Donald Trump thinks, this is the way that we're going to have to provide for our future, if we have any sense at all.
Pailthorp: Bill McKibben, author and activist, thank you so much.
McKibben: What a pleasure. Many thanks to you.
Bill McKibben speaks Tuesday night at Town Hall Seattle, presented by Seattle Arts and Lectures. KNKX is a media sponsor of this event.
